All kids love toys, but how kids from around the world play with them
show striking cultural differences and some comforting similarities. In
his Toy
Stories photo series, Italian photographer Gabriele
Galimberti spent 18 months photographing children from around the
world and their most prized toy possessions. He said:

"The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning,
they wouldn't want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time
before they would let me play with them ... In poor countries, it was
much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn't really
care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside."

Ben Machell of The Times Magazine wrote:

Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to
the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old
boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained
their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed
waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals
respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each
child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves
Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels,
while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling
through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.